Finding the funny and interesting side of the encyclopedia anyone can edit

20110110

Frozen poo, paradoxy, worldwide conspiracy, and full-contact chess

Hope we all had a good weekend. It's just started to snow around here, and it's coming down pretty bad. Drive safely. Today's post covers the infamous blue water in planes, a list of paradoxes, chess combined with boxing, and fnord.

I've made jokes about "full-contact chess" in the past, but chess boxing makes it a reality. It's just like it sounds: speed chess and boxing, taking alternate rounds for a total of eleven, with a 60-second reprieve between each. Wins can be done by checkmate, KO, TKO, decision, or disqualification if a chess round passes without a move. It is an interesting mash up of a brutal athletic event and academic prowess, where either one can win the game. A champion boxer literally wins by beating his opponent until he can no longer stand, and chess it a gentleman's game practiced by nobility and military geniuses alike. The sport was first envisioned in the early 90's, while the first professional bouts were held in 2003.

A bout in Berlin in 2008.

﻿Logic: who doesn't love it? If you said "not me", then get your liberal hippie ass off of my blog!

Ahem. As I was saying, most everyone enjoys a good logic puzzle now and then; indeed, most good jokes have one as the basis of the punchline. List of paradoxes is a good read for bending your brain a bit. One of my favorites, Paradox of the Court, combines ethics, finances, and jurisprudence: if a law student and teacher agree that the teacher will be paid when the student wins his first case, and then the teacher sues the student, who pays whom? The interesting number paradox itself is dull, but that's what makes it interesting... but the fatal flaw is that numbers aren't interesting anyway. The Ship of Theseus wonders that, if you have a wooden ship and replace the planks one at a time as they rot, when does the ship stop being the original ship? What if you take those rotted planks and make a new ship? If the ship were on Pawn Stars or American Pickers, how much money would they get for it?

WARNING: stubbing your butts in here will cause the universe to implode.

I generally have disdain for conspiracy theories (grassy knoll, 2012, moon landings, 9/11 inside job, etc.). But the Illuminati conspiracy is particularly ridiculous to me, so I have to laugh at fnord. Purportedly, it represents the attempts of The Man to misinform and redirect unwitting citizens of knowledge of the conspiracy. Luckily, outside of novels, it mostly has been adapted by t3h interwebs as a synonym of "surreal" or as a metasyncratic variable, and not accepted at face value as subliminal mind control.

If you've ever used a porta-john (portapotty), then you know about the blue water disinfectant. Such a liquid is also used in the waste tanks of commercial airliners, and which despite popular belief, cannot be dumped in flight. However, sometimes, the tanks might leak, and at altitude, it would freeze, resulting in the notorious blue ice. On occasion, it will fall off the plane (about 3 dozen recorded incidents in the last three decades), and detach and cause FOD. Yuck, can you imagine the insurance claim for that?